Kershaw had moved out, and Tinsley never had the pleasure of unleashing his new moves on her.) That`s when he discovered the game`s complexities, its algebra. ''Oh, how she`d cackle as she`d jump my men.''Ī few years later, when he was 15 and looking for a geometry book in the Ohio State University Library, Tinsley came across ''Winning Checkers,'' an elementary book by Millard Hopper. Kershaw ''used to beat me and rub it in and laugh and laugh,'' At that point he knew only the arithmetic of checkers. Kershaw, a boarder in their Columbus, Ohio, home. Tinsley can`t remember exactly when he learned to play checkers or who taught him, but as a child he played with his father, his brother and Mrs. Some of my insights into the Scriptures come the same way.'' A lot of my discoveries come that way, out of the clear blue sky. ''Out of the clear blue sky an improvement of a published play will just come to mind, as if the subconscious has been working to come to light. Now he has cut his study time to an hour a day, but ''hardly a week goes by when I don`t discover something new. The boards are almost superfluous, though, because Tinsley devises most of his checker strategy and makes most of his moves entirely in his head.Īs an Ohio State University student, he spent eight hours a day working on checkers, studying and analyzing moves, learning openings and memorizing plays. He also keeps a magnetic checkerboard at his bedside to work on problems when he wakes up during the night. The two dozen checker pieces are red and white. The 64 squares are of green-and-buff tiles, easier on the eyes than red and black. On a cluttered table in his den, beneath a ceiling fan, Tinsley`s custommade checkerboard is set up. The scarcity of opponents doesn`t bother him: ''I guess I love the game more than the players.'' Sometimes friends fly into town for games. He is unmarried his mother, Viola, 92, lives with him, but she has not learned to play checkers. No checker player in Tallahassee or anywhere thereabouts is good enough to keep up with Tinsley. ''If (chess champion Bobby) Fischer is erratic and flamboyant, then Tinsley is the exact opposite-very quiet, very subdued.'' Also his temperament: He`s calm and doesn`t get excited, although he says he gets butterflies before a game but you could never tell. Besides that, he has the ability to picture and look ahead 30 moves and accurately portray a board position. ''For one, he has a terrific memory, an eidetic memory, like a photographic memory. Grandjean, of the American Checker Federation, describes it with admiration: Tinsley is hard put, or too modest, to define his own style of play. He has penciled in notes and corrections on almost every page.Īnother book, ''Checkers: The Tinsley Way,'' was written by admirer Robert Shuffett in 1982. It`s his checkers bible, full of checker moves interspersed with anecdotes, quips and poems about checkers. One 45-year-old volume, Ryan`s Modern Encyclopedia of Checkers, has been read so much that he had to have it rebound. Upstairs in the den of his country home, just south of Tallahassee, Tinsley keeps about 200 books about checkers-a small collection, he says.
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